Obama’s Pay Freeze is a Sham

Nov 29, 2010

RUSH: So Obama is now gonna ask for a federal pay freeze for two whole years. He’s gonna save $2 billion. I mean, big whoop. (interruption) Twenty-eight billion? Yeah, if it lasts that long, that’s my point, $28 billion, big whoop. Twenty-eight billion and he’s got a deficit run up of one and a half trillion. Twenty-eight billion, we’re supposed to be impressed by this? Sorry, not me. Especially since he’s locking in pay raises for people, essentially pay raises for all these new hires. If I were one of these new hires and there’s all this attention being paid to how bloated the workforce is getting and all of a sudden the president just announces, in effect, not a pay freeze but a guaranteed salary for whoever knows how many years I’d be celebrating. Obama’s just hired all these new people and locked ’em in and now he’s out there presenting this as some kind of great economic savings day with a two-year pay freeze.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

Jacksonville, North Carolina, Finley, great to have you. Hello.

CALLER: Hello, Rush. Thanks for everything you do, brother.

RUSH: Thank you, sir.

CALLER: Hey, a comment on the pay freeze for civilian employees. Seems to me first Obama spends us into debt for the next 20 generations and then he cries about we have too much debt and then he says, oh, wait, we can save $2 billion by taking a pay freeze for the hardest working government employees in career civil service. Here’s another example of the gross hypocrisy. My wife is a civil servant working with the Marines. I’m retired Navy and both my son and daughter are career Navy, and it’s just frustrating, irritating.

RUSH: I can imagine how you feel about this. Your wife is civil servant working with the Marines, you’re retired Navy, your daughter’s retired Navy, all this —

CALLER: My daughter and son are both active duty Navy.

RUSH: Active duty. Okay, so why are you frustrated?

CALLER: Well, it’s just another example of the hypocrisy of Obama. You know, he spends us into debt, spends money we don’t have, and then says, oh, we have to do something about the debt. Oh, here’s two billion, we’ll just freeze the wages of these —

RUSH: Right.

CALLER: — hardworking people. It’s not right.

RUSH: Exactly right. And then he wants all this credit for this. ‘It’s gonna be really tough on these people, Mr. Limbaugh.’ This is Mr. New Castrati speaking. ‘That’s right, Mr. Limbaugh, this is very tough, only federal workers are forced into a pay freeze, and that’s a sacrifice they are making for the good of their country.’ Yeah. Well, how many of them have been hired? The federal workforce has, what, gone up how many percent since Obama took office? And now with the pay freeze they’re locked into a salary that on average is twice what their counterparts in the private sector make, and we’re getting the swan song, the violins have been pulled out for them. And then on top of that we’re supposed to be impressed after one and a half trillion dollars of debt that we’re gonna save two billion. (laughing)

Anyway, the pay freeze does not stop the step increase. For example, there’s GS-1, GS-13, GS whatever, the GS’s have been frozen but if you move from GS-13 to GS-12, or whatever the direction, you get a raise, all Obama’s gotta do is promote ’em. There’s no pay freeze here. This is all a smoke screen, and these step increases can be fairly big. I mean there’s a difference between the various pay scales, I think there’s 13 of them. I don’t know which is higher and which is lowest, GS-1 is lowest, 13 high, I don’t know which is which, but when you step up it’s not insignificant.

Brandon in Michigan, nice to have you with us on the EIB Network. Hi.

CALLER: Mega Rush Baby dittos, Rush.

RUSH: Thank you, sir.

CALLER: Absolutely, one is the lowest, 13 is the highest, and we still get our annual increases. They’re only locking in the freeze on the — call it the inflation component.

RUSH: Oh, is that right? Only on the inflation component?

CALLER: Right. You have mandatory increases for inflation every year. That’s all they’re freezing. We still get our grade increases every year which means my salary will jump up an extra ten, 12 grand a year.

RUSH: Help me out here, I think GS-18’s the highest?

CALLER: GS-15 to my knowledge.

RUSH: Okay, whatever. But within all of these GS levels there are steps, right, like GS-13 is a grade, but you can be GS-13 step two, GS-13 step three?

CALLER: Oh, absolutely, absolutely, you can be a GS-13 step 15.

RUSH: Right, which might put you higher than a GS-14, step one.

CALLER: Correct.

RUSH: All right, so there you have it. There’s no freeze at the end of the day in real terms. There’s no freeze. It’s just semantics. It’s just designed to make the unemployed think that federal workers are also getting hurt a little bit. Thank you very much, Brandon.